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Higher Education: Not a Worthy Charity
As part of their annual alumni gathering the UCLA Anderson School of Management posted a boast on Instagram about how the class of 2002 raised $1.2 million for the school. I certainly support charity, but this boast really struck me – is this the best place for these talented people to be putting this amount of money? Are colleges and universities, as they currently operate, good places for charitable dollars?
Let’s put some perspective on the economics of attending the Anderson School (I am only picking on them because I am an alumnus). The current cost of the full-time program at UCLA is $96,966 for residents and $109,540 for non-residents. The executive program costs close to $150,000 (note the link shows the cost of one year of the two-year program). I am a 1986 graduate of the UCLA management school full time MBA program. My total tuition costs were $3,000. Tuition increased 3,133%, a 12% compound growth rate. Inflation adjusted tuition would be $6,674, a 122% increase with a 3% compound growth rate. In 1986, UCLA was ranked #8 by US News. Now it is ranked #15.
On the cost side, I could not find much information on the Anderson School, but spending at the University of California has grown massively (health care and hospitals are part of that) like it has at most universities. And the spending is not on education. The number of faculty has stayed relatively constant while the number of administrators has grown steadily. From 2000 to 2015, enrollment increased 38%, faculty numbers stayed flat, and administrators more than doubled. From the LA Times: “The number of those making at least $500,000 annually grew by 14% in the last year, to 445, and the system’s administrative ranks have swelled by 60% over the last decade — far outpacing tenure-track faculty.” Again, health care plays a role in that unbalanced growth but this article in the American Spectator details how politically correct “research” pays extremely well. Does a donation go to something that delivers social value?
I won’t go into the corrosive politically correct, anti-free speech environment that has taken over many if not most universities. Others have written about that. But is that something we should support with charitable dollars?
Mrs. Clavius and I stopped out donations to UCLA when the Faculty Senate voted in kangaroo session to condemn the second Iraq War. This action was never disavowed or criticized by the administration and not reversed by a more proper convening of the Academic Senate. Since then, they have eliminated the requirement to read Shakespeare to get an English degree. Yet another reason not to support this institution.
Our older daughter is just finishing up a degree at Gonzaga University in Spokane Washington. She has had a wonderful experience at this Jesuit institution. We had been generous supporters of the university until they hired Melissa Click, the infamous “get some muscle” woman from protests at the University of Missouri. The hiring was done after a “nationwide search” revealed her to be “most qualified” candidate for the position. That cost us our faith in the administration and cost Gonzaga further donations.
I firmly believe one must donate to worthy causes as much as one is able. I am afraid that higher education no longer qualifies as “worthy” for me.
Published in Education
An Anderson School grad, eh? I worked a year in higher education across town at USC when I thought I’d had enough of the egos, bad attitudes, and overall nonsense of the entertainment industry. After a year in higher ed, I was ready for the comparative sanity, good manners, and right-wing politics of Hollywood again.
For that year, I worked in one of the professional schools’ alumni office. Here’s something I learned that’s most galling: At least a quarter, and often one-third, of what students pay in post-graduate tuition to the professional schools – i.e., schools of business, engineering, law, medicine, dentistry, etc. – goes to subsidize students in the graduate schools that cannot pay for themselves. This is pretty much de rigueur at all universities. At USC, those would be the schools of dance, education, fine arts, social work, theater, etc. So if a law school degree cost one $100,000, it really cost $67,000, and the student paid $33,000 to a student to become a social worker. With grants and donations from alumni, corporations, non-profits, etc., professional schools pay for themselves very easily, and a professional degree should actually cost much less than a master’s in ethnomusicology. But universities charge the same rate – if not more – for the very desirable MBAs and JDs and use the extra cash to subsidize the students getting doctorates in Neo-Colonial Indonesian Lesbian Studies who have no career prospects other than finding a job at a college teaching courses in Neo-Colonial Indonesian Lesbian Studies to other students who will go on to teach college course in Neo-Colonial Indonesian Lesbian Studies…
So the productive are being forced to pay for the useless. Ain’t college wonderful? The lesson is, if you want to stop making professional students involuntarily subsidize Leftist-indoctrinated teachers and social workers and terrible conceptual artists and so on the way you unwittingly were forced to do, stop donating to your law school, medical school, business school, etc.
FWIW, I somewhat feel the same way about college sports. So what if these kids live in the same town I used to? They are not there to get an education, and they certainly are not living anything remotely like the life I was living when I went to school. They are nothing but a money grab for the school, a way to get rich alumni to pony up big money to get good seats at football games.
My education doesn’t get better if they win a bunch of games and it doesn’t get worse if they lose a bunch of games.
My husband and I lived in Reno from 2005 to 2011 and we attended a GK Chesterton discussion group once a month. (James Lilacs missed this in his, and much more, in his Ramble podcast. Love you James but…) We loved the Chesterton group because there were older, middle-aged and young participants. We read and discussed different works by GK. In the last two years, there were three recent grads from Hillsdale. They were great…articulate, they read the works and generously contributed to the discussions.. I was impressed.
Indeed, but try making California voters care.
No matter how much the public is looted the voters seem broadly indifferent to it.
Do I have to go to California to loot the California treasury?
The same thing happens with Public School teachers in Illinois. Your pension is based on your last couple of years earnings, so the teachers and the administration find a way to artificially goose those earnings, which increases the pension for the rest of your life in a way that no other pension system does (and in a way that you can never appropriately plan or fund for.)
That’s why I don’t fall for the “But our children” sob story when they wind up perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. The problem in Illinois isn’t limited to the politicians, the public sector unions share a lot of the blame, and I hope they get hit really bad when the shinola hits the fan (I just hope I’m out of the state when it does.)
You would think market pressures would do that. But students continue to be willing to pay these huge costs for professional degrees.
I know. And I just don’t understand. I vote in every election, but I swear I am so outnumbered it has little effect.
As Glenn Reynolds would say, things that can’t continue forever, won’t.
And it won’t be pretty.
Law school enrollments are down 30+% from 2010 and total numbers are equivalent to the 80s. The average LSAT score is down to record lows.
Some of the potential dupes are wising up.
Yes, Glenn Reynolds has been covering that well. But it appears to be at the marginal schools (I guess that is where the market would first make changes known).
The MBA side seems to be going strong. A colleague has just signed up for a two-year Wharton Executive MBA that will cost $200,000. I am not really sure how the math works on that.
Law schools are a pretty depressing place.
There aren’t many students who apply to law school saying, “I really want to help giant corporations crush the little guy!” No, they’re idealistic about fighting for the environment or poor people in the ghetto or abused women, etc., etc. Then they start to watch the debt mount up. And they realize the only thing they can do to pay the loans off is to become yet another faceless cog in a multinational firm like Morrison & Foerster, Paul Hastings, Skadden Arps, DLA Piper, Jones Day, etc., working eighty hours a week on mindless paperwork drudgery that’s barely a step above paralegal duties in a hugely competitive pressure cooker environment while any personal relationships they have are destroyed. Many become slaves to their debt, trapped in jobs they hate just to service the huge debt they took on, and a lot of them burn out fast. Stick around a law school long enough, and you’ll see them and hear the stories; it’s really sad.
If you’re a rich kid whose mommy and daddy can foot the bill out-of-pocket, you can go be a crusading inner city human rights attorney. But those inner city kids who struggled their way through school and took on loads of debt? They have to work for the developers wanting to raze those inner city neighborhoods to service their loans.
Hi, I’m Amy Schley with $260K of law school debt working a $37K job outside the legal profession. I don’t think we’ve met. :)
I gave up on being a lawyer when I went to spend a week with a girlfriend’s family in Memphis. Her father was a senior partner in a big firm, and still worked a lot of Saturdays and some Sundays. I never wanted to be rich that badly.
The theory behind continued giving to your alma mater is that the transaction is not complete – you have an interest in maintaining the standards of the institution to preserve the value of your degree in the job market. Because that institution’s name appears on your resume for the duration of your professional life, you should want to build up the reputation of that institution, and therefore your donation is also in part investment.
One thing about about the UC system is that the State of California used to basically pony up 90% of the costs, so tuition rates were extremely low.
If you do the math it is easy to see where the costs in a university is.
Assume a student takes 30 credits per year.
Assume the average professor teaches five, three credit courses a year (i.e. 5 x 3 = 15 credits a year). This is a pretty average load for a tenure track professor in engineering or business at a major research university, a little on the low side for humanities, and a little on the high side for the hard sciences.
Assume the professor costs $100,000 in salary and benefits (on the low side).
If the class size was one student per lecturer than the cost to the student would be (30 / 15) x $100,000 = $200,000 per year.
Schools like to advertise their small class size, so let’s say an average of 20 students per class, which means the cost of the professors is (30 / (15*20)) x $100,000 = $10,000 per student per year.
This does not include any administration, staff, janitors, maintenance, energy, buildings, libraries, etc. Let’s say that comes to an overhead rate of 30% so the lowest cost it could be is $13,000 per year. The only way to make a university education much cheaper is to increase class sizes, increase teaching loads, or lower professor salaries.
So you can easily see how some schools end up charging $40,000 per year when the average tenured professor has half that teaching load and twice the salary.
Lol. No one I ever worked for gave a damn that I graduated from Davidson. It did get me into law school, though.
I do think that is the theory but do not think the donation will truly help the long-term reputation of the institutions they way they are currently being run.
I got out of law school owing 3 grand. No scholarships, no nothing. I don’t see how students justify it now. This was admittedly a few years back.
“Are colleges and universities, as they currently operate, good places for charitable dollars?”
No.
Did you see the P. J. O’Rourke quote in this morning’s The Daily Shot:
“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
It is unfortunate that her son is suffering from her foolishness. Of course, we don’t know that what she has written on her sign is true.
For me, the truth behind her stupid sign is that she actually expected to even be able to get any job with such a dumb non-marketable major, and that our colleges and universities should be ashamed of themselves for even offering these idiotic PC subjects as courses, let alone entire degrees. I agree with O’Rourke, though, that it’s her own dang fault. A conundrum: how does anyone dumb enough to major in women’s or any kind of ethnic “studies” even have the brains to get into any school in the first place?
Standards have continued to be lowered.
“The number of those making at least $500,000 annually grew by 14% in the last year, to 445,”
To 445? Making a half mill a year? Why should anyone working at a college make that kind of money?
Intelligence is not synonymous with wisdom.
Because the federal government was happy to lend her money to get the degree and university was happy to take it.
In part because the government (and the university) have conflated a degree with an education. They are not the same thing. An education is valuable, a degree is worthless.
Exactly. And it’s not all sports coaches, either.
I searched “ethnic studies” on my university’s website and the only relevant hits I got were gender studies and Chinese studies minors. Here’s the relevant part of the Chinese studies minor’s mission: “Chinese Studies provides students with academic experiences, knowledge, and skills to understand China as an ancient civilization and emerging global power.” It might serve a purpose. The mission statement for the gender studies minor is as silly as one would expect: “The Gender Studies minor allows students to study the extent to which gender and gender relations are socially influenced. Students will examine the ways in which conceptions of masculinity and femininity directly impact social and political institutions and practices, cultural expressions.” I cannot imagine developing a major on such inanities or even providing graduate programs in it. P. T. Barnum comes to mind.
The fun at the UC system continues, nothing to see here according to the AG.
Way to pass that buck.
Perish the thought!
But keep those donations coming in UC alumni.